Internships.com Survey

This survey came to me through an email subscription that I receive from Internships.com. It consisted of seven questions and, as it claimed, only took a few minutes to complete. I thought it was odd that the first question was a personal question asking about what year the participant was in college because we learned that it is best to ask personal questions at the end of a survey and to start by easing the participant into the survey with more vague and easy to answer questions. Perhaps the survey designer thought that it would be best to start off with a question that the participant would automatically know the answer to.

Another oddity about the first question was that the survey assumed all participants were currently attending, had attended, or would attend a college or university. There was no option for not attending college. Since it was only a "student" survey, a high school aged student who was not planning on going to college could have been taking the survey and was therefore not given the option of "not attending college." By forcing them to pick an inaccurate option to describe themselves, the participants would thereby be skewing the data collected in this survey.

1 Comment

You were right - we wanted to start the survey by easing the participant in with a question that was straightforward.

As for the methodology of the "Student" survey, we know that an extremely high percentage of our users self identify as current college students or recent college graduates. And in analyzing our data we take this into consideration - so the sample size will be a representation of college students and recent grads.